the 10-q: TED Dintersmith

The VC legend on disrupting America’s school system. Plus: What’s in an Elon Musk cocktail?

You were a successful venture capitalist. now you want to take a wrecking ball to college education. why?

Watching my kids in school and saying, “What the hell?” It’s as though educators want to crush out of kids the very skills and mind-sets they will need.

why are educators doing that?

They follow a 125-year-old model. But now it’s much worse, with this Game of Thrones competition to get into the best colleges.

but doesn’t Game of Thrones pressure force kids to be more active?

Totally disagree. Teens across America have rising rates of suicide, depression and anxiety. American kids consume the majority of ADHD drugs prescribed in the world.

Is online education the answer?

Let me be the skunk at the garden party here: Making it easier for kids to shove math procedures into their short-term memory is hardly reimagining education. We don’t need to do obsolete things better; we need to do better things.

what are better things?

Stop requiring calculus, for one. Start requiring statistics.

explain.

Ask, “Hey, Boeing, Microsoft: Anyone here doing integrals and derivatives by hand?” That’s laughable. It’s all done computationally.

But statistics—every company I talk to is desperate for somebody with data-analytics capability, where statistics is essential. I’d even argue that having a good and prosperous life requires statistics. Your big medical decisions, your big investment decisions—you need a statistical framework.

You recently spoke about this to 250 college admissions directors. what did they say?

They said, “We like calculus because it’s hard. It gives us a good way to compare the kids.” What a bad justification.

They don’t realize how many talented kids get missed?

They know it and still don’t care. MIT, with great fanfare, said it was going to look at applicants’ Maker Portfolios, projects that kids do outside of school and work. Imagine a student with a brilliant portfolio applies. He’s a potential practical genius, like Thomas Edison. But MIT may still turn him down because “he did really great things, but he’s going to have to get our introductory courses, and we don’t think he can.”

Do you foresee a day when employers take over education from colleges?

Yes, and here’s how I do it. Big companies like, say, Xerox, complain that they lose the top candidates to Google. If I were Xerox, I’d set up a Xerox Academy and go get the really talented, motivated kids out of poorer high schools, kids who are going to struggle otherwise. I’d make it selective and say, “You’re now a Xerox scholar.”

sounds nice, but how would it work?

Four years of coresidential, lots of intensive internships at Xerox, plus supplemental things like sports and theater. Structure it like ROTC: “Do this for four years and get your Xerox degree. You’ll need to stay with Xerox for four years.” Xerox would get an amazing injection of next-generation leadership—that scrappy kid from Fort Wayne who just will knock down walls to make something happen, whose family can’t afford most colleges. If I found the right entrepreneur who was doing this, I would write a big check for it.